Damsel In Distress
by Eve-Mag
Summary: The story behind the infamous mission.


by Sunforge

I have to tell you: Amarr women are far more trouble than they're worth. Every time I get involved with one, even peripherally, I always come off worst. I don't know what it is about them, perhaps it's their aloofness, perhaps it's those corsets they wear, but their attitude always puts them to the left of where I'm expecting them to appear, which causes problems every time I run into them.

What set me to thinking about Amarr women? Well I had a little escapade recently which brought everything into sharp focus. It started out with yours truly (that's me: the hero) sleeping the sleep of the just and the noble. I was dreaming of? I can't remember what I was dreaming of but I'm pretty sure that my dream didn't involve someone or something shoving a wet nose in my ear, which woke me up quicker than an interceptor off the starboard bow if you know what I mean. The nose was attached to a large dog, whose owner I'd affectionately dubbed Fido, mainly on account of the fact that the owner wasn't much brighter than the three foot tall, hundred pound bag of fur and slobber that dragged him all over the station on errands.

The three hundred pound bag of fur and slobber was called Mikey and let's just say that Mikey is the doomsday weapon of slobber: it's quite incredible how much a dog that size can produce. Anyway I was rudely awoken by the beast and realised that I needed a wash before I even got out of bed, which wasn't a great start. Setting that aside for a moment, Fido, the owner of the hound, announces pretty bluntly that The Man in the Big Office wanted to see me. At no point in this conversation did he offer to explain how he got into my room, or why he was waking me up at 3 am and before I could put these questions to him he departed with a final warning: "And you'd better hurry up you're already five minutes late". Great. What time was it again?

So, half asleep and covered in slobber, I stumbled up to the Big Office, with a slight detour via the Quafe machine for a can of Extreme. Have you tried it? If you haven't, let's just say it's a very different way to wake yourself up. Anyway, I was in a hurry so I shotgunned the can down and, shaken but not stirred, I bounded up the stairs hoping that the Quafe wouldn't mess with me whilst I was speaking to The Man. Luck wasn't on my side: the door was shut and the goon in front of the door gave me the firm sign that I wasn't welcome right now. Valuable, sane, un-Quafed, minutes crept by and I could feel it's effects creeping up my spine. Eventually the goon put two fingers to his ear, nodded and then ushered me inside. I think it was about then that the Quafe hit me.

"And why are you late?"  
"Gnngngngngng…?" The Quafe was beginning to re-arrange my thoughts into a small conga so it could have a party in my head.  
"No matter, sit down", I tried to sit but the Quafe won't let me, so I jiggled up and down on the spot. "Sunforge, we have a situation" He began. To be honest the rest of his speech disappeared into a mild buzzing at the back of my brain as the Quafe took hold and shook my senses down into my boots. I think he mentioned Damsels, bad guys and possibly cash. It was probably after the cash bit that I was gently but firmly manhandled out of the office by the same goon that showed me in. I probably blacked out after that although I'm not quite sure.

I woke up in my ship as it was leaving the station.

"Soooooooo" I said, turning to my trusty bosun, feeling a little unnerved about where I was and what might have transpired in the intervening period "What's up today?"  
The bosun gave me one of his pitying looks "You got us a mission? You remember that part?"  
"Uhm maybe, maybe not, why don't you remind me Kzen"  
His pitying look deepened into a pained expression and then he began:  
"Well in between you drooling on the flight console and the incoherent babbling I think we're after a Damsel in distress and she's probably" He punched some keys on a data pad with malevolent efficiency "About here", He gestured at the overhead map being projected onto the screen to my left, then he continued "…Somewhere on Kruul's turf. I think she may be in one of his pleasure dens"  
The problem I had at the moment was one of focus: once Quafe has done it's thing it tends to leave your brain rather dishevelled, leaving a trail of pieces behind it. I was frantically trying to put the pieces back together but they were flat refusing to fit for me.  
"Pleasure dens?" I gabble.  
"They're, uh…" Kzen looked like he knew more about this subject than he ought to, then he continued "The kind of place the Caldari frequent" He appeared to sniff a little at this "Debauchery, licentiousness, the usual fare I'm sure. Not the kind of place you'd expect an Amarrian Diplomat's daughter to turn up in."  
The usual fare? Was he talking about the food? Diplomat's daughter? My brain was still too addled to make sense of it. Did he really say Diplomat's daughter?  
"So in summary" Said I with a confident swagger "We swoop in, kill the bad guys and get the girl, yes?" I was frantically hoping that this would neatly sum it up and project the right aura of confidence.  
"Uhm, yes I think that would cover most situations" Kzen replied sarcastically.

Now there's two things you can do after a Quafe-Quake: the first is get yourself straight and ride out the bad bits that tend to follow and the second option, for fools and heroes only, is to have another can.  
"Kzen – I'm going to need another hit of Extreme, can you break one out of the emergency kit?" I said as innocently as possible.  
He looked at me like a frightened rabbit "Are you sure that's wise Sunforge?"  
"Kzen, I'm a professional, you know I can handle it and" I paused for dramatic effect, then carried on "I'm also the boss, so pretty please, with sugar on top: get me a pracking can"  
Bless him, he did as he was told and one can, a minor blackout, a few warp jumps and a hurried arrival at Kruul's place I found myself surrounded. "That never happens to me" I thought to myself.  
"You sure about that?" said a voice in the back of my head. This wasn't a voice that normally pinged round my head, so I was pretty sure that the Quafe that was talking to me again. Before I could straighten my thoughts out the voice continued "Oh, and Kruul's just called you a bad name". This wasn't a good start I thought to myself. After that though, I have to admit that things got a whole lot worse and I think I may have started it…

Anyway to cut a long story short, the Damsel was working there, Kruul wasn't in the mood to talk, I had an itchy trigger finger and no-one, but no-one, calls me a Minmitar pod pucker and gets away with it. I have a confused memory of the fire fight itself, I know that I jabbed a bunch of buttons and a whole heap of things went bang. There was at one point in the drama, a lot of shouting from Kzen although I can't remember what that was about and then the Quafe induced fog cleared when he jabbed me with a syringe full of something like rhino tranquiliser. It was a lovely vista that greeted me: wreckage everywhere, I wasn't in my pod and there was the gentle "ting-ting" sound you get from a bank of rapidly cooling laser turrets.

"So, where's this Pleasure den" I enquired, feeling a little odd due to the combination of Quafe and whatever jungle juice Kzen had jabbed me with. There was a suspiciously long pause and no-reply.  
"Kzen, the Pleasure den?" I could hear a shuffling of feet and then after another pregnant silence came a response.  
"Uh, Sun, I think you blew it up" Said Kzen, somewhat distantly.  
"I couldn't have done; I'm a professional".  
Then it sort of hit me as bits and pieces of recent history reassembled themselves into a Quafe filtered picture of what had really happened. As the bits and pieces came together they neatly fast forwarded to the wince making moment when I remembered that a big pleasure pod shaped structure had indeed gone Ba-Bang or perhaps Ba-Da-Boom or maybe even Kerblowie. It mattered not since I could recall it all in Horrible Remembered Technicolour: I'd blown up the pleasure den in a moment of Quafe inspired madness and there was no way I was going to be able to explain that to The Man in the Big Office, without a big painful interlude in my career the moment I'd finished explaining it to him.  
"Fwack" Said the voice at the back of my head "You made a boo-boo". Damn I hate the quafe voices. I hate it more when they're right.  
"I didn't kill her did I? I mean these pleasure modules are quite robust, I'm sure she'd have escaped, did you scan for survivors?" The words tumbled out in a great big hurry all wanting the Bosun's attention. "Fwack" I continued, or was that the voice at the back of my head again? Damn Quafe.  
"They are, probably given her background, yes and Fwack?" It was worse than I thought, it was me repeating what the voice was telling me.  
"Don't worry it's just the voices again, we did pick up the survivors. didn't we?" The Survivors! If there were any they'd be in the…

The voice at the back of my head began to fade as we both hurtled down to the hold to inspect the wreckage which the crew were hauling in. It was an eclectic mix of salvage: burned hull components, weapons and a little survival can with a blinking light on top. Before I could issue any instructions, the can was pulled to the airlock and the inhabitants extracted. It took me a while to negotiate my way round to the airlock to greet the, presumably stunned, survivors. Hopefully they hadn't witnessed the firefight and I could claim that it was one of Kruul's guys that put the smack down on their pleasure module.

When I got there it was quite a sight: there were about a dozen or so, very scantily clad girls milling around the deck area but one of them caught my eye: she was arrestingly attractive but something was wrong. She looked a little, you know, Amarrian? Anyway she looked me straight in the eye, smiled and then parted her lips.  
"Are you the captain of this ship" She said. Her accent was one you could cut glass with. It oozed old money, private tutors and the kind of exclusive clubs that the rest of us only get to read about.  
I'm doomed I thought to myself: not any old Amarrian woman an old money Amarrian woman with connections and she's half naked and cute and…I managed to stop thinking too hard at that point.  
"uhm, yeah" I said as confidently as I could "Looks like things got pretty nasty out there but if you want the full story, why don't we go back to my…" I didn't get too much further than that because she stepped smartly up to me and kicked me very hard in the balls. Pain exploded in my head, and other areas caught up with similar notificatons pretty swiftly.

To cut a long story short, in between the groaning (all mine) and the scuffling around (yup me again) trying to avoid some very well aimed kicks (that was all her) from the, extremely attractive and half naked banshee (perhaps she was part Minmitar?) from hell, I discovered the following entirely new facts about Amarrian women: not all damsels need rescuing, some of them like being pole dancers and being the daughter of an Amarrian diplomat meant that she could do some very interesting things to my career. Oh yes: and I was indeed a Minmitar Pod Pucker, she was sure of it since she saw my ship targeting their module. I was however the recipient of some good luck during the undignified scuffle: apart from a very bruised ego, she hadn't broken anything vital.

The Diplomat's daughter spent most of the trip back to the station telling the bosun all about the methods that senior diplomats used to stunt people's careers when they didn't like them. This spurred me on to rack my brains for an answer to the career shredding question mark that the banshee had had neatly put over me. It was about ten minutes before we docked up that the answer arrived in a moment of glorious clarity: Amarrian Diplomat's don't like their half-naked daughter's pictures getting into the news.  
"Kzen" I shouted, "Get yourself up here right now".  
A few moments later my trusty bosun was at my side.  
"Yup?" he looked quizzical and slightly frightened, but then Amarr women have that effect on you if you're left alone with them too long.  
"Kzen do we have the cam logs from the loading bay"  
"Of course"  
"So they'd show" I coughed "her" I coughed again for effect just in case he didn't get the idea "in that outfit in the company of a bunch of people an Amarrian diplomat wouldn't want to have his daughter seen with?"  
Kzen grinned at me: "Oh yeah, the cameras probably got a pretty good shot of all that".  
"Kzen, if those pictures got accidentally beamed to the Big Office, that would might provoke a reaction wouldn't it?"  
He smiled again "Oh yeah, that'd definitely provoke a lot of action".  
"What are you standing around for Kzen, you'd better start beaming a log or ten"

Well I don't know what they made of the cam logs in the Big Office but I do know that our ship was met by a substantial delegation of men in Black Coats who wanted to ensure that the Diplomat's daughter was swiftly removed from the ship in exchange for a very large bundle of notes, a tap on the nose and a long speech about, you know, keeping your mouth shut just in case they thought you were a Minmitar Pod Pucker who might, you know, tell the press anything unfortunate. I assured them that I wasn't a Minmitar pod pucker and that the press was, on the whole, not my friend, especially since the Questor incident.

So that's how it all ended and perhaps, in hindsight, not all Amarrian women get the better of me and before you ask I'm not going to tell you about the Questor incident just yet.


End file.
